Smarter Sidebar and Group Chat
Last winter Facebook rolled out a new unified Message system that threaded together messages, chats, texts, and emails. Today they’re making itsmarter. You already have a sidebar that features your most frequent chat buddies; now it’ll scale to size of your browser window.

The other addition is group chat. When it comes to planning your next happy hour, Facebook won’t keep you thirsty. You can start with a conversation with one friend and bring more pals into the mix by clicking “Add Friends to Chat.” Facebook even archives the entire multi-threaded conversation in Messages.

Video Conferencing
We think Skype is great, but it’s only as useful as it is accessible. After Skype added some Facebook smarts to its popular video conferencing service, Facebook is repaying the favor by integrating Skype video calling directly into its Chat. This means that you have all your friends (or at least 750 million of them) corralled into one place. Because it’s built into Chat, the process is simple: Just as you’d initiate a new chat, click a friend’s name; when the window appears, click the new camera icon to initiate a video call. Of course, like any good announcement, it’s not available yet. However—and this is a big however—if you click over to this link you can get it now, though you will have to run a quick installer when you launch that first video conference.